


Loss Ficlet: Pearls

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (In Chronological Order) [23]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Modern AU, Smut, Tea Party AU, jamie x claire, sex in the Laird's Room, smut with plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 17:37:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20474945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: After a Lallybroch tea party hosted by Maggie Murray, Jamie and Claire retreat to the Laird's room at Lallybroch to reconnect after a separation occasioned by life and schedules. (Jamie POV)My final contribution to the Outlander Summer of Smut project.





	Loss Ficlet: Pearls

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to everyone who supported this wee Summer of Smut project. It has been an absolute blast to write with Danielle and Britt. <3

**** **Loss Ficlet  
** **Pearls  
** **August 2017  
** **(Jamie POV)**

****_↳ Soundtrack: _**Black Match - [Same Old Things](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DR3nfYb2AZr4&t=ZjBjMTEzMjY0Y2QzMzJjYWZhOGE0ZWY5ZjAxZDcyOTAwMzRjMmI1NixUaDhYVVZLZg%3D%3D&b=t%3A8SuHe82Anz5oexLlYdsCeg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fmissclairebelle.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187415499276%2Floss-ficlet-pearls&m=0) [_have you ever seen heaven, even in a daydream?_]  
**

Loving Claire was easy, but loving Claire in the unusually broiling heat of our second summer together was like tasting sun-melted, salted caramel after a lifetime of parritch and bannocks. Making love to her on those pliant, sweaty nights made a fantastical part of me believe it possible to absorb the energy of the high August sun, harness it, and let it vaporize my good sense. Muddling through the moments after release with light heads and drifting fingertips, we painted our afterglow on her bedding, lifting the duvet over our heads only when she whimpered about being _chilly_.

Claire in the summer drove with the windows down, her arm riding invisible waves and the outline of her wide-eyes filled with a boundless kind of joy that grew as we descended deeper and deeper into the season. She sang ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ at the top of her lungs, fingers turning the knob on the car radio and body straining against her seatbelt to dance freely (_shoulders leading first, the scent of early freesias blooming from her hair_).

At the start of the weekend, she shed her clothes in the entryway of our flat. After we got our baser needs met and the attendant cleanup out of our way, she would put on nothing more than one of my t-shirts. And she would stay thus clothed until the next round.

Her summer drink of choice was gin. Ice cold and straight from the freezer, she adorned it with crushed basil (_plucked from the rectangular planter of unruly herbs on our windowsill_) and macerated strawberries or fat slices of hydroponic cucumbers. She declared herself a mixologist with her eyes closed, sweating tumbler in hand. Half drunk and freshly showered, she later found me reading on the balcony. Wordlessly, she settled onto my lap and glanced at the veritable jungle of sweet potato vine obscuring us from view as she carefully unzipped my pants and settled the soft, wet heat of herself against me. “I was _thinking_ about this moment – about _you_ – when I planted this spring.”

Loving Claire had always been easy. I had loved Claire when she showed up to that distillery, tended to my arm, and walked away from me in a pub, brazenly swaying her fat arse. I had loved her the first time I brought her home, and each subsequent time she appeared at my doorstep. But in the summer it was _simple_. I loved her when we moved in together, when we had arguments (_over organic blueberries and rinsing out recyclables and how much to spend on one another for Christmas_).

During our first summer I’d mentioned it to her once – that _the thing between us_ seemed so easy in the summer. It was late in July and our ankles were tangled together. We had been planning a weekend holiday to the Isle of Skye. She had plucked the iPad out of my hands, thrown one leg over me, leaned into my chest, and taken hold of my cheeks. “It’s because I’m falling in _love_with you, you besotted fool.”

She had kissed me thoroughly, body bowing into me. My lips were dumb, motionless and slack, as she did her vampiric best to rob me of breath. It was the first time she had said it that openly, without the prompting of me having said it first, or the oppression of life’s darker moments calling for some reassurance. She was carefree, no longer careful. She’d broken apart from me, our mouths’ suction popping wetly.

As though it had borne repeating, she said, “I’m in love with _you_. _Not_ summer.”

I loved her most, but that was the start of my love affair with a season.

In the year following that July confession, Claire had attended every birthday party (_tying her hair back before she slipped candles into cakes_) and assorted family get-together (_making a special trip to the store for his-and-hers Christmas pajamas_). Despite the fact that she had been a good sport in the past, I was hesitant when I mentioned Maggie’s party – a celebration of her hard-fought victory over a very loose and very stubborn front tooth. My deadpan disclosure that the entire soiree had been funded by the Tooth Fairy earned me a hiccuping laugh against my chest. Where reticence had resided in the other number of women I had dated, Claire responded with incredulous, knit-together brows.

“_Of course_ I’ll go,” she breathed, kissing my cheek.

That night, after we had looked through photographs of Ian’s birthday party posted on my sister’s Instagram – including some snapshots of Claire pointing out shapes in the clouds to Maggie (_a second-annual cloud-identification extravaganza_) – Claire had whispered, “I’ve always wanted to be part of a family.”

Feeling my forehead crease, I took her hand, kissed the back of it, and said, “Ye _are_ part of a family, my Sassenach. Ye’ve become _my_ family.”

Two Saturdays later, we made the trip to Lallybroch.

Before our party’s hostess returned from her late-afternoon swimming lesson, we settled into the Laird’s room behind a firmly locked door. As Claire kicked her tan leather sandals off and flopped face-first into the duvet, I took to tracing the bump on the outside of her ankle. When she complained into the fabric that she was _ticklish_, I half-joked about wrestling her to the edge of the bed, slipping her shorts down over her arse, and burying myself to the hilt between her sun-golden thighs. She lifted her face from the duvet, her wind-mussed hair flopping over her face, and made the kind of noise that I would bet good money led Odysseus to tie himself to the mast of his ship just to hear the sirens’ song.

“Do you have follow-through, my lad?” she asked, blowing ineffectually at the curl resting along the thin bridge of her nose. “_Something_ tells me you’re all talk and no action.”

Before I could respond, her fingers were at the waistband of her shorts, urging them past the no-nonsense, seemingly bulletproof white elastic waistband of generously-cut pink cotton panties. I looked down at my watch and sighed raggedly just as she aimed her arse skyward, easing her knickers down just far enough that I could see the bowed crevice of her buttocks.

“Claire.” _God, I even _sounded_ like I needed her. _“We have _strict_ orders to be at that treehouse by half-past six.”

“I don’t think either of us need much warm up,” she teased, the duvet rumpling under her knees as she fought a one-handed war with her shorts and uncooperative arse. “It’s been a few days since we’ve seen each other…”

My balls ached at the mention of our three-day separation, the culmination of poor scheduling at the hospital and a business trip. I had last seen her for one of our regular summer lunch meetings on Thursday, when we had eaten bánh mì in her office with the door closed. With her lower lip trapped between her teeth and cilantro-scented breath, she had unzipped my trousers, circled me with one small fist, offered a single promising lick, and abruptly stopped when a page erupted urgently from her pager with a cockstand-ending intensity.

Other than an aborted blow job, we hadn’t had anything more than a kiss and a smattering of raunchy text messages since the Sunday before.

Just as I was about to deny her the quickie she apparently desperately wanted, she won the war with her shorts and panties, baring herself to me in a brazen, graphic way. _No. She did not need much of a warm up_. Adopting her chosen expression of exasperation, I muttered, “_Jesus H. Christ_.”

She rolled onto her back, shimmied towards the opposite end of the bed like some sort of boneless eel. The shorts fell to the floor with a soft _thwap_, and her legs fell apart easily. Her fingers crept along her stomach, over hip bones, to her inner thighs. Her voice was no more than a whisper as she said, “I’ve missed you.”

“Claire,” I warned as she propped herself onto one elbow, her touch carefully drifting between her thighs.

“_Please_.”

And that is when Maggie chose to knock and try the door handle, calling out, “_Auntie Claire?_”

I shot a glance over my shoulder, for the first time cursing my niece’s existence and her obsession with my girlfriend (_her Auntie_). Through gritted teeth, I responded, “Just a few minutes, Moogie.”

By the time I turned back towards the bed, Claire had rolled herself into the duvet like the tightest of wee burritos. Through the bundle of covers, I found the thickly-wrapped curve of her arse. As I gave it a firm pat, she groaned, “I need a minute. I have blue balls, Jamie.”

It seemed that we were the guests of honor at my exceptionally clever niece’s end-of-summer tea party (“_no boys allowed, except for Uncle Jamie_”). A squealing Maggie distributed various props to each of us. For Uncle Jamie, a mothball-scented top hat of unknown etiology that Jenny had supplied courtesy of “the Lallybroch attic of mysteries.” For “_Auntie Claire_,” a lacy white parasol and a matching pair of gloves. For Jenny, a patently depressing fascinator in such a stark black that it looked to be designed for wear by widows only.

Despite the fact that she had assiduously slathered us both in sunscreen before we set off to the treehouse at the edge of the property, Claire had become delightfully pink while obligingly sipping cup-after-cup of watery Earl Grey. The sun was high, and her useless parasol had done little to ward off sunburn. The contraption was balanced on her finely-boned shoulder (_lacy awning casting an almost-tangible delicate webbing across her skin_) as she established herself to be quite the good sport (_scones where “salt” stood in for sugar, delicate surgeon’s digits ensconced in cheap lace, white-bread sandwiches with neon orange spray cheese and too-thick slabs of cucumber_).

By the time we departed the tea party for the house, the sun having started its lazy descent, Claire was positively ruddy. Across the bridge of her nose, atop the swollen globes of her breasts, in a sharply-angled triangle between her shorts and top, and in a wash of color over the bracket-shape rise of her collarbones.

I had every intention of spending the night inside of her, keeping her awake until the sky turned from ink to amber.

She skipped ahead, spinning her parasol and calling to me over her shoulder. It was like staring at the sun, and I couldn’t make out a single word she said. I picked up my pace, feeling a bit like a child trying to catch an elusive, blinking lightning bug. I caught her just as she crossed the threshold of the house and started up the stairs. With her waist in my hands, I pressed her to the wall and licked my lips. Her parasol made a sharp, hollow sound as it clattered to the entryway tiles, and she giggled when I kissed her. It took her only a moment before her arms were winding around my neck, one thigh rising in invitation to lift her – to finish what we had started earlier.

“Ye ate a _ton_ of those salty wee scones, Sassenach,” I mumbled along the corner of her mouth, presuming from the tint smudged out of her lipline by our kiss that I likely had a haze of her berry lip gloss haloing my lips. “And now ye want me to carry ye?”

Her fingertips danced down my shoulders to her arms as her smile cracked wider, opening her face. “I do.”

_I do._

Those two little words breathed into existence a significant, lovely burden that she bore on her narrow shoulders. Spoken hundreds of times a day, the two words stand watch alone as meticulous twin guardians of a lifetime commitment. When spoken, they engraft upon another the duty to keep under lock and key another’s heart.

_And she had said it_.

Not in that way, but the preview of her saying it in _that way_. The syllables pulsed and bloomed under my skin.

_Christ._

I lifted, hands creating a seat for her well-formed arse. While I frequently teased her about her fat arse, there were few things I loved more than the heavy, soft weight of the useless appendage in my hands.

As I brought us closer and closer to the Laird’s room, she whispered such filth in my ear that I was hard pressed not to set her onto her knees on the stairs and fuck her absolutely senseless.

Before we were fully through the door, she shed her top and bra, baring the ruler-straight pink lines across her shoulders. In light of the warm heat pulsating through her shorts, it seemed like as good a decision as any to toss her onto the mattress and take care of my own shirt as she eased out of her shorts.

“Seven days,” she breathed, splaying herself out for me, looking at me through lowered lashes, sweet as clover honey. I shed my own jeans and boxer briefs. “Are you going to make up for our lost time?

“How?” I asked, fist pumping along the length of my cock once, twice, three times.

  
“_Hard_.” One of her hands was occupied by the mound of her breast – bisected into burns and milky sections where the neckline of her top had rested.

“_Ifrinn_,” I grumbled, the idea of being a little reckless with her almost intoxicating me as I tugged on my length one final time, though the look she was giving me was more than enough preparation. But then she inched forward on the bed, hooked a foot just above my left hip, and drew me closer, and I fought the urge to explode on the spot.

“And fast.”

“Ye sure?”

She pulled lazily at one nipple before nodding, reaching for a pillow and lifting her hips. “Help me put this under my–”

I nodded, obliging, as my names for her bubbled up – _a nighean, sorcha, Sassenach, Claire_.

My fingers journeyed between her thighs, touching, stroking, testing. Careful and slow, I slipped two digits into her, and when she fucked back onto them she released an almost feral moan. Her sound was a half-pained and half-pleasured – born as a corporeal being between us, lingering and teasing the types of noises I would be able to tease from her that night. Feeling properly chuffed with myself, I laughed when I directed her to “_turn the volume down_, mo nighean donn.”

“Or _what_?” Her voice was somehow playful even though the question was hissed.

I leaned forward, introducing my thumb to the most sensitive part of her. “Or I’ll find somethin’ else to occupy yer noisy wee mouth.”

The crude protest that she would _not_ be finishing what started in her office made me laugh even harder, a booming guffaw that was a hundred times more telling of our activities than her unbidden, desperate mewls.

“Now,” she pleaded, interrupting the hazy proposal only barely taking shape in my mind that I offer to shut her up with the wadded-up ball of her knickers.

“Hard? Fast?” I confirmed, and she nodded. “Ye dinna ken how ye look right now, _a nighean_.”

She lifted one ankle, trailed the tip of her big toe up my abdomen, my chest, along my collarbone. Her other leg fell to the side. “Tell me,” she tried, releasing her breast and starting a gentle, meandering stroke between her legs.

I just shook my head, unable to summon the force of will to describe for her just how my eyes saw her. I could hardly believe my good fortune – this beautiful creature who I loved, soft and wet, enthusiastic and spread out before me. _All mine_. I caught one ankle and didn’t think twice as I kissed the sole of her earth-stained foot and brought it to my shoulder. I caught the other ankle, kissed the arch of her foot. “Ye look like somethin’ the devil made to tempt me.”

She didn’t deny it. Arching so she could reach, she ran two wet fingers along my cock – root to tip. I felt that wee stroke in my belly, all the way back to my spine, down to my balls, in my thighs and chest, the tips of my toes.

“Feeling bendy, _sorcha_?”

“Do your best, my lad.” She smirked when I grunted.

I needed her. I needed her immediately, with a ferocity that was unkempt and messy in my wame.

With her legs pinned firmly to my shoulders, I leaned closer, pressed the tip of my cock against her entrance. “I love ye, but I dinna intend to make love to ye just now.”

“Then don’t,” she muttered, shifting her hips just enough that I had to realign my approach. “I didn’t _ask_ you to make love to me.”

And I obliged her request. I slammed into her in one even, forceful thrust that made her catch her breath. When she found her voice again after three firm, hard thrusts, her words mashed together into an echoing “_ohmygod_” and “_pleasegodplease_.” She clawed at my shoulder, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushing a deeper and deeper pink beneath her sunburn.

The ancient bed beneath us (_where my parents had conceived me, where my father and his father and his father’s father had been conceived_) moaned, but held steady as I thrust into her. I leaned in to capture her mouth, feeling the stretch of burdened hamstrings pull beneath my hands on the backs of her thighs.

  
“Okay?” I breathed.

Nodding, she lifted her head, kissed me, bit my lower lip, tugged, released only when she moaned. She cinched her tiny fingers on my shoulders, closed her eyes, and tipped her head back. The nonsense she spoke (_“the pillow… oh… God… right there… hard… Sunday… more”_) crawled into my every pore, urged me on, though I needed little urging with the way she started to clench around me. I felt her orgasm in her feet first, the arches of them curving tighter and going rigid along my neck. I watched a single bead of sweat from her ankle dribble down her calf, make a sharp left at her knee, and course down her thigh.

“I missed ye this week… I missed seein’ ye like this.”

“Just _seeing me_?” she groaned with the most self-satisfied smirk I had ever seen turning the velvet petals of her lips into abstract art. “Because I’ve missed something else….” Before her well-pleased expression faded, her hand slipped between us, and she started to draw furious, desperate circles on her clit. When the force of one thrust drove her hand sideways, I picked up where she left off. Her ribcage lifted then, hands reaching up, up, up for the headboard.

I saw the scream mounting before she could let it out. My hand slipped over her mouth to hold her summer sounds inside her lungs, behind her teeth. The violet of _pride in a job well done _pulsed behind my closed eyelids as I moved harder, faster, more decisively. In the silence occasioned by the capture of Claire’s mouth, a veritable symphony of sweat-slippery skin sliding on and slapping against skin became as eloquent as words or looks.

I had been right – under no traditional definition would the act in which we were engaged be called “making love.” Though the pace was furious, being with her like this occurred in slow motion – each thrust taking an entire age as we moved infinitesimally closer to release. I felt the glow of love for her with each pistoning slam of our hips together, each breath sound that I pushed out of her. It was in that moment that I came to the realization that even when I was fucking her, I was making love to her.

I came first, hard and with little warning. She had a victorious little smirk on her face as I apologized, falling forward and burying myself to the hilt. Grabbing her hips, I somehow managed to pull her closer, line her up with my pubic bone, and grind deeper as the last of my orgasm tugged itself free from my body. She came with a long, earthy moan that I caught with my mouth.

“I love you so much, Jamie Fraser,” she mumbled, teeth raking across my shoulder.

“And I you, _mo chridhe_.”

With as much gentleness as I could muster, I eased her ankles off of my shoulders. The sweat on her temple blurred under my lips and she breathed the softest, most contented sound I’d ever heard as I slipped free of her gently pulsing body.

We slept then, only for a short period.

When I woke, Claire was watching me and rain was slapping against the windows. It seemed to last forever – our silence, the touching, a quiet tandem breathing. The sheet had shifted just enough that she was bare to the waist.

“Your skin is so fine I can see the blood moving beneath it,” I said, tracing the path of a moonbeam across Claire’s bare stomach. “I could follow the veins from your hand to your heart.”

I drew my finger gently up her wrist to the bend of the elbow, the inside of her upper arm, and across the slope beneath her collarbone.

“That’s the subclavian vein,” she remarked, her voice low and gritty from sleep and sex. Her eyes followed my tracking finger.

“Is it? Oh, aye, because it’s below your clavicle.” She smiled, lifted her hand, and sank her fingers into my hair as my finger moved slowly downward. “Tell me some more.”

I liked the Latin names for things said in her voice.

“That,” she said primly, “is an areola, and you know it.”

I murmured something inconsequential, replacing my finger with my tongue and traveling lower.

“Umbilicus,” she breathed.

She was transparent, gossamer as I traveled lower and lower. I lifted one knee, put it where her ankle had resided earlier. “And what’s _this_, then?”

“You tell me,” she sighed, her fingers scraping at the nape of my neck with some urgency.

Incapable of speech just then, I lapped and sucked, going nearly cross-eyed as I attempted to look up the length of her body, to catalogue whatever expression it was on her face. Seeing only the underside of her upturned chin and heaving chest, breasts wobbling as she jerked and rolled her hips, I smiled.

With my nose pressed to her, her sounds made me into an eternal being.

A moan. A sigh. A plea.

Her hips moved, body shifting closer to the headboard. She was on her elbows, watching with half-lidded ancient amber eyes as my mouth wrapped around her most sensitive spot and my fingers coaxed inside of her.

I could have lived between her thighs, happily breathing only her smell and tasting pleasure caused by my lips, my hands, my words. Eyes closed, I found myself overwhelmed and dizzy at the scent of her (_like a sunburst holiday to the French Riviera – creamy stone fruit and mandarin, seabreeze_), high on her.

She came shaking and keening. After watching the show, I kissed the inside of her thigh and rose from the bed after for water.

When I returned from the en suite bathroom, Claire was wrapped in the plaid that had lived at the end of the foot of the bed for as long as I could remember (_nights of sore throats and sniffles when I was a lad and needy for my mam_). Seated, naked, and looking out the window, Claire’s hand hovered to keep the fabric drawn tight over her chest. Awash in the same creamy moonlight that had inspired me to venture between her legs, she looked like a Renaissance painting.

As quietly as I could, I went to the box on the dresser and carefully opened the lid to reveal what I was after.

_Pearls_.

I looked to Claire for a moment, then lifted the pearls from their forest green velvet nesting place. They had lived in this room for a long time after my mam died. My da showed me where he would leave them for me. For when the time was right.

“Ye give them to yer woman when ye ken, lad, no’ sooner,” my dad had explained. I had been too young to understand then, but I had nodded.

It had taken three decades to figure it out.

_Claire_.

She was the answer to a question inherent in my da’s instruction.

_My woman._ My person. A headstrong kelpie who grew more and more beautiful each time she shed her skin, whose voice became more and more like a song each time she said my name.

_Mo nighean donn_.

She didn’t turn as I approached, just tilted her head. I let the pearls loose from my hand in front of her, carefully bringing the strand around her neck. She exhaled, took the necklace in hand, and studied it.

“They’re Scotch pearls,” I explained, sitting next to her. Her brow was furrowed when she lifted her head just enough to face me. “They belonged to my mother, and now they belong to you.”

She turned the strand over and over in her hand, curls falling across her cheek. It was fine – I couldn’t bring myself to look at her even if I had wanted to.

“They’re one of the few things I have left of her.” I inhaled, swallowed hard, focused on the bundle of undergarments discarded in a pile at the foot of the bed. “They didna leave this room after she died until we moved in together. I’ve visited them, talked to them. This probably makes me sound mad.”

She stayed silent, shook her head.

“They’re very precious to me. As are you, Claire.”

Wordlessly, she leaned in, kissed my shoulder. I could hardly feel the tickle of her curls along my arm, but knew they were there somehow.

I finally felt I could breathe again when the backs of her fingers traveled along my cheek.

Her head angled low, she lifted my chin and kissed me, letting the plaid low to rest at her lower back. I needed her suddenly, desperately. To take whatever warmth she could give me. I adjusted, spreading my knees as she stood, bringing the plaid with her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her – the parting of her lips, the soft lines of her concerned forehead, the gentle sway of the pearls between her breasts.

I kissed one taut nipple, the center of her chest, the other – tasting sweat with the pearls beneath my tongue.

I would have thought that I would feel strange with my mam’s pearls dangling between Claire’s breasts, seeing the slight sheen of arousal glistening on her inner thighs as she kicked one leg over my hips. But it was easy, natural. Like the only story the universe could write was _that one_. The one where Claire Beauchamp made love to me in the Laird’s room with my mother’s pearls at her throat.

She reached between us, took me gently in her hand, and guided me into her so very easily.

She rocked against me slowly, not quite lifting and sliding back down, just _moving_ like a loch lapping at the side of a boat. She set an easy, languid pattern, turning her hand, threading our fingers together on her thigh and bringing them up to her mouth. When she kissed the back of my hand, I thought I was going to see black. I blinked hard over and over again, trying to concentrate on something steady, like setting sights on a horizon while on a boat.

The closest thing to steady that I had was _her_. The gentle shiver of her breasts as she rocked and ground against me. The space between the pearls and her skin where her geometric clavicle lifted the strand away from her body. The dusting of a shadow where she had not bothered to shave for our weekend – a familiarity that made my cock harden further, my balls ache to spill into her again.

She guided my hand to her hip and raised the plaid up around my shoulders, mouth falling open against mine as she attempted a figure eight. She did it again; however, her efforts faltered as the center of her gravity met the pad of my thumb. “_Oh_,” she breathed, eyebrows rising.

My hands sank into her hips, not bruising in their intention, but needing to take her flesh nonetheless.

Over a year earlier, I had shown her the treehouse, told her about what my da had shared with me about knowing _the one_. I had told her that it was her. I had made love to her in the stables that weekend, exposed parts of my viscera to her – that in my dreams, she would let me make her a mother, and that she would make me a father. And with my mam’s pearls rehomed to the woman I loved, it became a primal need to one day conceive that child in the Laird’s room at Lallybroch.

In that moment, with the subtle clack of the pearls against one another, and the determined pout of Claire’s lower lip interrupted by her teeth, I wanted nothing more than to reside with her in the moment for an eternity. With a hand firmly on her lower back, I narrowed the space between us until I could see the quiver of her pupils before they swelled, replacing molten gold with obsidian.

Afterward, she traced the shape of my throat with a single fingertip, whispering, “I love them, Jamie. I love _you_, but I need to tell you… I knew you had them. When we moved in together… I found them while I was unpacking.”

Kissing her temple, I inhaled and knew it had always been _forever_ with her.

As the last of the summer suns rose on the epilogue to the month of August, I realized that I had made good on my intention to be buried inside of her at dawn.


End file.
